the way i bite into a too-sweet coconut candy and remember to call my grandma. “Popo buy for you!” exclaims Eih Eih, each time. Not in her native tongue, her words belie the urgency to express another’s love.
i imagine she thinks about her mother, back home, humming a Burmese tune that threads through her string of sisters on a straw-stuffed bed. “She prays every night,” my grandma tells me.
Left unsaid, the ponderance of devotion. My Popo in a bone-wearied gait down the aisle for the right brand of candy; Eih Eih on her knees, palms in a pious convergence; the sweet crunch between my teeth that bids me dial that eight digits i’ve worn into numerous keypads for two decades past.
If only I can reach back to your times of most impatient loneliness and loneliest impatience. If only I can give you a hint that – as you rightly and defiantly believe – you do meet the one you have dreamt up ages ago and continue dreaming of.
All the times you feel unmoored: like life is moving forward but you merely floating, seeking a somewhere intangible and undefined. All the times you feel unknown to others. A profound aloneness. All the times you wonder what you must do to find or conjure this somewhere, something, or someone.
Is it dogged persistance? Hard work? Something about yourself to be changed or learnt?
No, Qing, you simply have to wait, intolerable as it is. Until your lives – floating, but towards each other – meet. Buoy to anchor.
One day, soon, he will be your universe. One day, you will write your vows to him and they will be the most truthful words you’ve spoken. One day, he will mean more to you than you do to yourself, a detachment of the ego and an attachment to love as you have always wanted.
He is a much gentler, kinder soul than you are, the sort you long to be. Good news! He brings a softness to your stubborn, prideful spirit, and you will want to be more and better for him; for what you bring into the world with him.
Dearest young baby Qing, there is one last piece of news I would bring you, if I could. You may not believe me, but hear it anyway: He loves you just as much as you do him. If you have ever feared your capacity to love (and you have!) … don’t. He has just as much to give, and wants all you have to offer.
It used to be a private affar: the almost tangible weight of wetness and the inescapable racket even an amniotic fort of blankets cannot keep away.
When the clouds start to crowd I’d feel myself sink – the ground I’m on slowly submerge while everyone else stays level.
Then I’d hold my breath until the sun is back out again.
When we started going out, I watched him watch me whenever the ground ate me, and took in his confused concern. It made me almost embarrassed of my passive yielding to the damp, greedy earth.
“You get in such bad moods when it rains.”
“I do?” (I know.)
“Yeah, it gets really bad sometimes.”
“Oh. I hate the rain.”
He liked the rain, he told me. Especially when it rains when he sleeps. Everyone loves the rain when they sleep. It’s the first world’s giant cradle, the sheltered modern man’s fuck you to nature on it’s hunt for vengeance.
My rain dissolves concrete and metal and seeps right through me, into me.
*
On his bed, in the lull between words, we lay watching the congregation of clouds both outside and inside me. “You know… you’re making me hate the rain too.”
I didn’t reply, because there was nothing to say. But this time as I descended into hibernation I felt him grip my hand a little harder and didn’t let go.
Q 